Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Productive Procrastination

I have been deliberately and admittedly procrastinating.I should be knitting on the big sweater I'm working on.I'm not.And I have good reason.On Sunday, that sweater gave me a scare. A very bad scare that I do not care to repeat anytime soon. And since I have to repeat the steps which caused that scare at least 5 more times- I'm avoiding it.No, avoiding it is not going to solve the problem; but I'm doing it anyway.What happened?What took you so long to ask?! ;)

Sunday, I steeked the sweater. That means, for you non-knitters, I cut it. Yes, CUT it. A sweater body that took me 3 weeks to knit up. I CUT it. (Yes, that word requires capitalization.) I'm so very very glad that I asked Joel first if I should get the hard part out of the way first or start with the easy bit. He said easy bit, so that's where I went. Fortunately! Because as I was picking up the stitches to knit, the steek started to unravel!

I have no clue why it did that. I'm using a fairly sticky, non-treated wool yarn, and when I steeked a superwash yarn using the same method (EunnyJang's crocheted steek) I had no such problems! I was finally able to salvage it by figuring out my sewing machine enough to machine stitch around the steek. Then yesterday, I machine stitched the tar out of the other 5 steeks I have yet to CUT, as a preemptive salvage. But I can't quite bring myself to pick it up and do the rest of the work on it yet.

So as an attempt at putting it off, I started doing some cleaning. Yesterday, my cleaning turned into an attempt at bag making. Not knitting, sewing.

There are a lot of reasons I knit rather than sew. But once in a while, I seem to need reminded of those reasons.

I've been wanting a specific knitting bag. This one, to be precise. But there hasn't been much work for Joel's employers this month- so it's gonna be a long time (if ever) that I can justify paying that much for a knitting bag/purse. So I got to thinking about it and thinking about all the things I'd like in a knitting bag/purse and wondering if I could do it myself. I have a sewing machine. I have thread. I have a lot of scrap fabric. I seem to be developing a bigger creative streak.12 hours of figuring, cutting, sewing, pinning, and bleeding later:

A completely unfinished knitting bag/purse.

But it stands on it's own, and it has the terrible looking zipper in the right place. (putting a zipper into knitwear is 10x easier for me) I'll have you know that zipper alone took me 3 hours. I am not a seamstress. I am a knitwear designer.

The inside is utterly unimpressive.

But that's because it's not done.

Hey, I made the bag able to stand up. That took some time! And a lot of figuring. And even more fabric.